Choman Hardi

Choman Hardi was born in Kurdistan and sought refuge in the UK in 1993. She was educated at the universities of Oxford, London, and Kent. Awarded a scholarship by the Leverhulme Trust, Hardi conducted her post-doctoral research about women survivors of genocide in Kurdistan- Iraq. The resulting book, Gendered Experiences of Genocide: Anfal Survivors in Kurdistan-Iraq (Routledge, 2011), was chosen by the Yankee Book Peddler as a UK Core Title.

Hardi has published collections of poetry in Kurdish and English. In 2010 four poems from her English collection, Life For Us (Bloodaxe Books, 2004), were selected onto the English GCSE curriculum in the UK. In 2014, her poem, Summer Roof, was chosen by London’s Southbank Centre as one of the “50 greatest love poems of the past 50 years”. Her second collection, Considering The Women (Bloodaxe Books, 2015) was given a Recommendation by the Poetry Book Society and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection.

Her translation of Sherko Bekes’s Butterfly Valley (Arc Publishing, 2018) won a PEN Translates Award.

After 26 years of living abroad, she moved back to her home-city to teach English Literature in the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS) in 2014. She founded the Centre for Gender and Development studies in 2015. In 2016 she was given the AUIS Excellence Award for Undergraduate Faculty Research. Currently she is working on a research project entitled, Gender in the Kurdish Revolution; 1976-1991.